WORK
The Maslach Burnout Inventory
The twenty-two-item instrument Maslach developed in the 1970s — <em>the</em> operational definition of burnout, translated into dozens of languages and validated across four decades — whose blind spots the AI moment has made clinically consequential.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the most widely used measure of occupational burnout in existence. Developed by Christina Maslach in the late 1970s and refined through subsequent decades of psychometric research, it operationalizes the three-dimensional burnout construct into measurable subscales: Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization (later Cynicism), and Personal Accomplishment. Each item is rated on a seven-point frequency scale, and scores are aggregated by subscale rather than collapsed into a single burnout number. The instrument's differentiated profile is its diagnostic strength — distinguishing which dimensions are affected enables targeted intervention. But the MBI was designed for a world in which the three dimensions were expected to covary, and the AI-augmented workplace has violated that assumption in ways the instrument cannot currently detect.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The MBI's development followed Maslach's systematic interviews with human service workers — nurses, teachers, social workers, police officers — whose accounts of depletion, detachment, and diminished competence converged into a recognizable clinical
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